ArmaVeirana 2022

  Week 4 & 5: Last Week at Mossel Bay and Return To Boomplaas   The last week I spent at the Mossel Bay lab was an incredible experience. The weekend ended with a hike along the Kingfisher trail in Wilderness where our group was surrounded by vervet monkeys after a short river crossing.    The rain that came in Sunday night wound up washing a juvenile cape seal as well as a juvenile cormorant. As zooarchaeologists it was important that we collected their remains to bulk out our reference collection. So, they now sit in labelled garbage bags within the lab freezer. Both Tuesday and Wednesday were rainy, leading to another dead seal washing up on the beach. Luckily, by Saturday the rain had stopped, and the temperature had picked up significantly. Celebrating this we took a 20 km hike along the Cape St. Blaize trail. Between watching scores of dolphins swimming and the beautiful South African coast, it was the perfect ending to a great time doing faunal analysis in the Mossel B

Week 2: A busy week was just wrapped up for the Boomplaas field season near Oudtshoorn, SA! The team was busy opening the site, as well as having many of our members attend and present at the Southern African Society for Quaternary Research. As much of our work this week was moving sandbags and taking opening Total Station shots, as well as attending/presenting at the conference I think this is a good week to introduce the Boomplaas site a bit.   Site Crew loading equipment to carry up to the cave.   Boomplaas is located in the foothills of the Swartberg Mountains in Southern South Africa. This place Boomplaas in what is locally called the Klein-Karoo (Afrikaans for Little Karoo). The Karoo is partially defined by its aridity, something which makes the well-watered foothills where Boomplaas is located special in the region.   Lunch Break outside the cave, overlooking the valley at the foot of the Swartberg Mountains. Boomplaas cave has been in use since potentially 80,000 years before

HOMER Orientation!  Welcome to the first blog post from the Boomplaas 2024 Winter season! The group consists of numerous students from across the world including Brazil, Namibia, and Tanzania. We are beyond excited for the incredible opportunity to work in the field and to grow our knowledge base and skills in zooarchaeology, lithic analysis, and anthropological excavation. For this first week those of us here as part of the HOMER program have been going through orientation. The next 5 and a half weeks, we will be excavating the Boomplaas site. Orientation was based in Mossel Bay nestled within the Garden Route of South Africa, and we had the opportunity to visit multiple cave sites.  Our first day for HOMER orientation was Sunday May 11th, and here we are almost a week later on the 18th about to head inland to Boomplaas! To start Orientation we were introduced to the major find types we could expect to see at Boomplaas: faunal remains, lithics, and roofspall.    Students familiari

 Ciao! Well, we've reached the end of our time here and our final blog post. It's hard to believe over a month has passed since we first arrived, it feels like time moves differently in this little corner of Italy. This past week, we students completed a preliminary analysis of the Mousterian layers of the cave and thousands of faunal specimens from 6 different stratigraphic aggregates. Some questions of interest were: which animals are represented in highest frequency and how does this differ between the layers? Where are the most densely butchered bones found? So far it is evident that bovids and cervids and long-bone elements were present and butchered the most. Also of interest to us was that each layer contained bear bones, except for one. The data and analyses will help drive future research questions and excavations to increase our knowledge and understanding of the habitation and use of Arma Veirana by Neandertals, modern humans, and other animals.   One of the most val

 We have officially finished coding all the faunal material and are working on preliminary analyses to get an overview of the Arma Veirana site and faunal specimens. Questions we are interested in asking are: What are the differences in the assemblages in each stratigraphic layer? What animals are represented and what skeletal elements make up the majority of each assemblage? What can this tell us about hominin use of the cave? While working on data analysis, we are also enjoying our final days in this special part of the world. We've had the privelege of traveling along the coast and visiting two fantastic museums. The first, the Museum of Prehistory at Balzi Rossi, is situated right along a massive cliff face that houses several paleolithic cave sites. An enthusiastic tour guide showed us around the museum, pointing out significant finds such as the skeletal remains of a female individual ("La Donna") who up until a decade ago was mislabeled as male, Mousterian lithics,

Ciao friends! We have been hard at work in the lab this past week getting the final faunal remains coded into our system for further analysis, which we will begin shortly. The work has been extremely rewarding and humbling, looking through thousands of small animal bone fragments for hints of human and Neandertal influence such as cut marks and fire. As we continue to build our relationship with the local landscape and people, it becomes even more evident that this valley must have been a place of beauty, serenity, and shelter for ancient peoples and animals of all kinds for a long time. The sense of place is strong and it is easy to see why. We took two days off so Jamie, Caley, and Noor could travel to Nice to bring Nonna Deb to the airport, who graciously and with much energy provided 4 year-old Noor with entertainment and care for three weeks.  Now Noor plays sweetly in the lab while we work, entertaining us with her fantastic imagination 😊 During our two days off, we students to